Friday, April 4, 2008

A Haunting Piece on Hillary

Just read this 15-year-old piece by the late Michael Kelly about Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady and in her "politics of meaning" stage.

It's pretty long but very interesting and worth reading today given her designs on the White House. Kelly pretty much hangs her with her own words. But she comes across not as an unsympathetic character but one that is slightly deranged and possibly dangerous given her thirst for power.

One line jumped out at me. Late in the piece she says:

"I want to live in a place again where I can walk down any Street without being afraid. I want to be able to take my daughter to a park at any time of day or night in the summertime and remember what I used to be able to do when I was a little kid."

And Kelly writes:

"At that moment, irritation still edging her voice, she doesn’t sound at all like the Hillary Rodham of 1969. She doesn’t sound like a politician or a preacher. She sounds like just another angry, sincere, middle-aged citizen, wondering how everything went so wrong.

What the line reveals is the frustrated utopianism that still lives in Hillary Clinton's heart. I can only imagine two places where a mother would be able to take her daughter to walk down "any street" or to a park "at any time of the day or night..."

Those two places are a police state and nowhere.

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